Sisters, Strangers, Friends: Queering the Political Discourse of Love
By: Ting Guo (she/her)
“Xianzi, we love you!”
– Chinese netizens supporting China’s most high-profile #MeToo case
“You’re not holding a magic flute, but just a raggedy flag
You look exhausted but you have yet to stop
I love you so
The obstinate you, the rose-coloured you”
— Taiwan singer Anpu 安溥, “Rose-Coloured You” (Anpu 2012, 4:58) (1)
Heterogeneous uprisings occurring this very moment across the globe, including Egypt, Chile, Ecuador, West Papua, and Paris, of which Hong Kong is but one node… that challenge has always come from below.
— Lausan (2019)
In September 2021, China’s most high-profile #MeToo case, Xianzi 弦子 versus Zhu Jun 朱軍, had its second hearing after an interval of three years. Xianzi (Internet alias for Zhou Xiaoxuan 周曉璇) was an intern at China’s Central Television (CCTV) in 2014, where Zhu Jun, a celebrated national television host and a household name, allegedly sexually assaulted her.
The court ruled against her due to “insufficient evidence” after having refused to admit Xianzi’s police report, DNA evidence, surveillance footage and other evidence that would help to prove her case, while Zhu Jun sued Xianzi for defamation (Xianzi 2021). Furthermore, those who voiced their support for Xianzi on Sina Weibo were censored, and their accounts were permanently deleted. Xianzi also encountered repeated censorship as she attempted to share the verdict of her trial. It is not only patriarchy or gender violence that feminists in China are fighting against, but also censorship and, ultimately, authoritarianism. Nonetheless, feminist activism in China has found a way to survive through a series of crackdowns. Thanks to the global connection of #MeToo and the transnational connection of Chinese feminists today, Xianzi’s case was shared within and outside China in major media outlets and on social media. Xianzi herself has not given up. She stated on social media that she will appeal. She has written powerful essays as a notable voice for #MeToo and feminist activism in general and is a strong supporter for other young women. Even her Weibo account is named “Xianzi and her friends” (xianzi yu ta de pengyoumen 弦子與她的朋友們), showing a strong stance for solidarity.
Nymphia Wind in Taiwan presidential office
Rather than seeing queerness as an identity category, I refer to queering as a framework for the process of subverting authoritarian, heteropatriarchal and ethnonationalist politics. Writing on queer kinship, Judith Butler (2015, 243) emphasizes transgression as a defining feature of queer kinship, that is, kinship undertaken by social actors exceeding social norms and breaking prohibitions with “conscious claiming” of bonds. As Lin Song (2022, 117–118) further suggests, queering, as a verb, highlights the motion, transformation and constant process of negotiations and the mutually constitutive nature of queerness and kinship in the Chinese context. In queering, “queerness” is not a concept with fixed meanings but an open signifier that acquires meanings in the process of discursive construction (117–118). The idea of queering proposed here regarding queering love not only emphasizes a social bond of activists through the discourse of love that subverts top-down heteropatriarchal politics and state-sanctioned, monopolized expressions of love but also the constant movement, negotiations, divergences and differences within such subversions and among activists themselves.
My article studies the political discourse of sisterhood within #MeToo and other social movements in China, Hong Kong and transnational Sinophone communities and the ways in which such discourse challenges the state’s parental governance and chauvinist nationalism with feminist and queer solidarities. The current People’s Republic of China regime has emphasized a new conception of love that associates notions of family, obedience and social stability with Confucianism and “traditional cultures,” aided by new gendered narratives of nationalism in the cybersphere. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s former Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s discourse of motherly love during the 2019–2020 mass protests further demonstrates the impact of such parental governance in post-Handover Hong Kong. In response, a non-familial, multi-layered notion of sisterhood, termed queering love, emerged from grassroots feminism that challenges the state’s political discourse of love in parental governance and patriarchal nationalism with social and queer solidarities. Such queering and transnational alliances beyond and against national boundaries further confront the authoritarian claim to a singularity of identity and the authoritarian monopoly of love, providing emotional reparation and new dialogues for societies in change. In a time when most national and global politics strive to divide people into us versus them, the queering of love in activist solidarities challenges political boundaries in multiple forces of imperialisms and nationalisms with non-familial and transnational connections. By declaring emotional solidarities with strangers in other communities, societies and nations, this framework further invites us to question the racialized nature of the heteropatriarchal politics of nation-states, which was most vividly animated by Taiwanese American drag queen Nymphia Wind’s spectacular performance that captured the world at the RuPaul's Drag Race (which she won with a self-made ‘Banana Budda’ costume) and her subsequent performance at Taiwan’s presidential office with a rainbow of fellow drag queens. In the then outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen Tasi’s words, “Nymphia is a queen of the world.”
Note
(1) Anpu was previously known as Deserts Chang 張懸.
Read the full article here: Sisters, friends, strangers: queering the political discourse of love
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Ting Guo is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her most recent publications include articles on religion and social movements in Hong Kong in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Asian Studies. She is writing her first book Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China. She co-hosts a podcast called "in-betweenness" (@shichapodcast).